﻿

“WOW!” people say. “You were so YOUNG!” I hear. “How could you have KNOWN?” Are they questioning my maturity? My wisdom? How DID I know?

I don’t know.

In hindsight, I had no idea what my life would hold. I had no idea what it took to love a man for his whole life. How could I? I was SEVENTEEN!

But I knew this…I loved him. He was a good man with a good heart. We shared our Christian faith, which was very important to me. He loved his family well. He was cute and funny and played lacrosse. HOT! Above all, he was kind. He hated the reputation of being the nice guy, but my heart knew that was my favorite thing about him.

We loved in the way two teenagers know how to love. We did our best. We fell fast and hard and both of us knew very early that this could be the thing…but we had a lot more life to get through.

We went to college. Together. His version and my version of how that happened are different. No matter what he tells you, I did NOT follow him there. Period. End of sentence. But there we were. That was either a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not sure. But we survived it. We fought. A lot. No surprise there! There may have been alcohol involved, and new-found freedom. We were definitely finding out who we were outside the confines of home and the High School we went to. We both lived in sorority/fraternity houses where everyone knows everyone’s business. And there was alcohol involved. If you knew us well in those years, you might be surprised we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary. Our love looks nothing like it did in that season.

Vital love changes.

We married out of college and were parents in the next year. We were learning how to be grown ups in the world. Oh my, were we broke! We were learning to struggle together. I delivered our first baby by C-section and had another abdominal surgery within 5 weeks. Our newborn son needed a specialized medical treatment—out of state. Up to that point, we had not been prepared for anything other than a perfect little life. The swooning fast-falling love of two high school sweethearts was being tested. It began to look different. It had to. My husband had to care for me in some pretty gross physical ways that neither of us had ever experienced before. We had some pretty scary questions and unknowns about our baby’s health and his future. We’d never been parents before—so there’s that! Oh, and did I mention…we were broke! Any one of those things can bring enough stress to bust up a marriage.

But Vital love changes.

Our love didn’t look like it did when we were 17 and 18. It couldn’t. We grew. Not all of the growth was pretty either...(click below to read more)

We bought our first house, and brought two more children into the mix. We struggled with the decision for me to stay home or work. And an almost undetectable current from that decision is still underlying to this day. Dave’s job changed. In a big scary unpredictable and unexpected way. He was leaving fulltime employment for self-employment…in sales. We were already a family of five, and he was our only source of income. Yikes. Our faith was being tested. Could we trust that God had a plan for him? For us? We leaned into each other. Our love grew deeper as we took the leap together. Shared risk will do that—or it can, if you treat each other with gentleness and kindness.Vital love needs to change.Even a good love, in good times, can be a lazy love. A love you take for granted after a few years. It’s easy to let things slide. Little things. Like eye contact. Smiling at each other. Simple things, like just being nice.By no revelation of my own (thank you Holy Spirit), I began to realize that I myself might be the answer to all the little things that irritated me and drove me crazy about my husband. Through the gentle prodding of my Jesus by the Spirit, I began to look in earnest at myself. What am I like to live with? How much do I do to contribute to our love and happiness? When I’m thinking of griping and complaining to him, have I looked in the mirror first? Tried to take the log out of my own eye? I know this sounds overly simple. And obvious, perhaps, to everyone else. But it was revolutionary in our marriage and my feelings of love for my husband. They were little things. Subtle—but hard. A re-patterning of things like my tone of voice. My attention toward him—with 3 needy little children at my feet—before and after work. My attitude. That was the hardest. Shifting my selfish what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude. (Thanks Janet Jackson) Always the martyr, home with these kids all day, doing ALL the work, and getting NONE of the recognition. Not to mention the fact that the results of my daily labor were still a good 15-20 years away. Poor, thankless me. Ick. The attitude of my heart had to change so our love could change. I’ll never know who did more of the work around here. Although I could have about died trying to figure that out! When a first-born is married to a first-born (the least likely pairing to work out), there is a lot of delegating and very little doing. We were caught in the trap of trying to divide our labor, and even our acts of kindness, into a perfect 50/50. Exhausting. And aggravating. As the attitude of my heart—the base of all change—began to evolve, my need to measure everything evenly began to ease. I began to see that our love needed to look like 100/100%. And here’s the kicker: My 100% was not dependent on him delivering on his hundred percent. That would have put us right back to 50/50! My 100% needed to be unconditional—with no strings attached and no expectation of a return on my investment.Vital love changes. And that was the most profound change in our love.I don’t know what he was thinking or noticing in that season. And he doesn’t write or speak like I do, so you’ll probably never know either. But I do know that it was transformational. The same kindness that drew me to him as a teenager, was warming our home and marriage again and growing our love deeper. And different. Did I love him at 17? Oh yes. Did that look anything like my love for him 15 years later? No. Praise God.And boy is that a good thing. As we grew into a newer, gentler love, our kids were growing up too. And watching. Learning from better examples of loving each other in a marriage while you’re trying to live messy lives. We had not perfected anything. But we were much better.Which was good. Because storms were coming. Teenage storms. Family health crisis storms. And they’re still rolling in. We have weathered rebellion, drugs, learning disabilities, financial stress, Alzheimer’s, death of a parent, and more. Our current battle is our first with cancer. And we will weather that too.Because vital love changes, friends. If we let go of our expectations of what marriage should look like, what your spouse should act like, what our life should look like, and allow ourselves to live and grow into the life and the partner we have, then we’re open to the living, breathing, thing that love is. We’re more alive and aware to love and be loved. Not in a movie or romance novel kind of way. But in a real way. A full way. An evolving way. The best way.​